At the end of April, for the fourth year running, more than 30 Christians from France and beyond were announcing the gospel to many unreached people in the Paris area.
The week was organised by a local church in collaboration with the literature ministry (La Voix des Prophètes) and AudioVie (Global Recording Ministry). Many team members had never engaged in evangelistic work before. Two churches in the north of France brought their youth groups for two days to give them a taste of evangelism. It was a joy to hear a 13-year-old Christian give a report about the time he spent knocking on doors with an experienced evangelist. Another said: ‘This is the most amazing experience of my life!’
Majority Muslim area
The church is located in an eastern suburb of Paris with a 60% Muslim population. Each weekday morning after le petit déjeuner (breakfast), there was an hour of Bible teaching and then the teams headed for the streets for about two hours, returned for lunch, then went out to different areas of the city in the afternoon. In the evenings there were seminars related to evangelism and discipleship, which other Christians joined in.
A French Christian publisher had given 1400 Bibles to distribute. Many were taken gladly by people, as were hundreds of La Voix des Prophètes and AudioVie resources. The team had more than 200 significant conversations, particularly with people from North and West Africa. What was striking this year was the large number of non-Muslim French people whose attention was drawn to the French booklet Dear Abdullah – answers to 12 questions that Muslims ask Christians. Many asked specifically for the booklet, perhaps because of recent news headlines.
Reaching the Malians
There are about 40,000 Malians living in the Paris area, making it the town with the second largest Malian population after Bamako. Many of them live in a group of buildings owned by the council and most are illiterate. Every day a team went to visit them, sharing Bible stories using audio/visual resources. They could transfer audio gospel messages in their original languages to their mobile phones using bluetooth technology! In previous years a few of these Malians were converted and baptised following the week of outreach. They are going on well with the Lord.
Steve Taylor
At this year’s evangelistic meeting we were privileged to have Professor Steve Taylor from Liverpool who spoke on: ‘Faith and science: foes or friends?’ Well over 30 non-Christians came to the meeting and many copies of Brother Hicham’s new French book, Faith Under the Grill, were taken by the visitors. Please pray that the Lord will work in the hearts of those who received these resources.
On the preceding evening, Steve gave a well-attended seminar on ‘Dragons, Dinosaurs and DNA’. With recent and relevant arguments, Steve was able to challenge many of the ideas raised in atheistic scientific circles. He showed that the dinosaur bones still contain soft tissue and carbon-14 (14C) DNA, and thus the evolutionary theory (which claims that they are millions of years old) collapses.
Professor Taylor (who is also director of the mass spectrometry group at the University of Liverpool) has himself examined bones of a Triceratops. He sent the samples away to a commercial (secular) lab for the 14C dating, to avoid any accusation of bias.
‘We have sent off dinosaur bone samples to well-respected university laboratories elsewhere’, said Professor Taylor. ‘The results from dinosaur bone that we have dated come back with 14C present. We have the reports. Result: a few thousand years old at most! So far no secular researchers have drawn the obvious conclusion that the simplest explanation is that the bones are not millions of years old. But that is the conclusion I am drawing on the basis of the scientific evidence alone.’
For your prayers
• Please pray for the 20 to 25 children, mostly from Muslim backgrounds, who participated in a kids’ club and took home a Bible story booklet.
• Pray too for the young people who were on the team and who no doubt feel a sense of anticlimax after such an intense week. Pray that the Lord will guard, keep and guide them, so that they will be able to make the most of what they learned during the week.
• Pray that those who participated in the outreach will take the vision back with them and share it with the leaders of their home churches. So far, there are eight weeks like this one running in France, Belgium and Switzerland.
